Presentation
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The Influence of Native Language on Motion Event Encoding: An ERP Study
Poster C30 in Poster Session C, Wednesday, October 25, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Stephanie L. Lopez1, Marcus L. Forest1, Will Decker1, Julie M. Schneider1; 1Louisiana State University
Linguistic relativity is the idea that native language influences cognition and perception (Sapir, 1941; Whorf, 1956). According to linguistic relativity, speakers of manner-on-verb languages (e.g., English) and path-on-verb languages (e.g., Spanish) differentially attend to motion events based on their manner and path, respectively. However, little research has addressed how linguistic differences related to path and manner influence perception (Flecken et al., 2015). The current study investigates the extent to which English native language influences visual attention to, and implicit processing of, motion events manipulating path and manner. Thirty adult Native English speakers (Mage = 19.07, SDage = 2.84) and eighteen adult Spanish-English bilinguals (Mage = 20.22, SDage = 1.48) viewed motion events followed by sentences describing the preceding video presented one word at a time, while their EEG was measured with a 64 electrode Brainvision cap. Trials were either congruent (manner and path of video matched sentence), manner incongruent (manner of video did not match manner of sentence), path incongruent (path of video did not match path of sentence), or completely incongruent (neither manner nor path of the video matched sentence). Participants’ task was to press a button indicating whether or not each sentence was congruent to the preceding video. Using a 4 x 2 mix-design ANOVA on behavior we found a main effect of group that was driven by better overall performance in accurately categorizing motion events for monolinguals (M = 96.89%) than bilinguals (M = 93.23%; t(109.12) = -3.51, p = 0.0006). There was also a main effect of condition driven by all participants being significantly less accurate when identifying path (M = 92.19%) and manner (M = 94.68%) incongruencies than congruent events (F(3,188) = 6.95, p = 0.0002). Using a cluster-corrected permutation analysis, we identified significant clusters of activation at an alpha of 0.05 across groups during processing of path and manner independently. A 2 x 2 mix-design ANOVA comparing manner congruency (manner incongruent v manner congruent) across groups (monolingual v bilingual) in the N400 time window (350-550 msec) revealed a significant interaction over left-central electrodes (p < 0.05). This interaction was driven by a larger N400 effect between congruent and incongruent trials for bilingual compared to monolingual adults. These findings suggest bilinguals demonstrated greater surprisal on trials involving manner incongruencies compared to monolinguals. A 2 x 2 mixed-design ANOVA comparing path congruency (path incongruent v path congruent) across groups (monolingual v bilingual) in the N400 time window (350-550 msec) revealed a significant main effect of group at widespread left-central electrodes (p < 0.05). This main effect was driven by a larger N400 effect between congruent and incongruent trials for monolingual compared to bilingual adults, suggesting path incongruencies were more semantically taxing for monolinguals than bilinguals. Taken together, our findings indicate native language influences both explicit and implicit perception of motion events.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism, Speech Perception